all kinds of happy

last week my bff trish celebrated her birthday, so of course i wanted to make her an especially cool card. trish's passion is knitting and she is ♥AMAZING♥ at it, so i've made a few yarn-centric creations in my time; but this year, i wondered if i could do something a tiny bit more personal... like maybe even hand-drawn? as often happens, i had a few ideas, that didn't necessarily connect up. i did a super-fast version of one of them in my sketchbook about a month ago, which as you can see is a real working sketchbook, with tons of little snippets of ideas and testing of pens and cleaning off of marker tips, lol!

in the next few weeks, i started playing with watercolors and stitching... then i had a truly nutso idea that involved gluing variegated yarn to watercolor paper... i also re-noticed (as i have in the past) that the individual stitches of a piece of plain knitting (known in the jargon of the hobby as "stockinette" stitch) look a bit like hearts. i also found a really old sketch i'd done of balls of yarn, and wondered if there was anything interesting in that direction. eventually, i went back to the original idea, and did a real version of it in watercolor, with some pen outlines. a few days after that, i went back to the "finished" piece, and added some machine stitching detail. lemme just say that this is by no means the way i approach most assignments... but when i'm trying something new it often takes me a few go's and when there's time to pursue them, i enjoy the process of seeing where different ideas might end up.

meanwhile, i was fairly happy with this version and felt pretty sure it was THE ONE. but i wasn't in love with the shape of it... plus, pink is probably more my taste than hers. and in the meantime, the nutso-string-gluing idea had sort of grown on me. so i gave it one more try. et voila:

pretty sure you're not going to see something like *that* at hallmark (or indeed anywhere else, lol) but trish really liked it; and as you'll no doubt have sussed... it was fun to make! happy sunday, darlings, i hope that you've found "all kinds of happy" today, too! ♥